


Ghosts

by the_blue_fairie



Category: Fanny and Alexander (1982)
Genre: Child Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 13:28:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28546359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_blue_fairie/pseuds/the_blue_fairie
Summary: In some ways, Fanny is shrewder than her brother.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Ghosts

Fanny sees him first – their father, at the harpsichord, head bowed – as if he were alive.

Fanny sees him first, awakens Alexander…

Her father’s eyes meet hers – sunken with sadness, a little lost, lines beneath them as from weariness, all the lostness of the living in them…

Her eyes are wide.

* * *

Fanny takes a grey woodcarving in her hand.

“Whose doll house is this?”

“Fifteen years ago, two little girls lived in this room. They drowned in the river with their mother.”

“Perhaps the house is haunted,” she muses.

Her mother answers deftly, “There are no such things as ghosts.”

Fanny does not press the matter.

* * *

The spoon is hard, rammed down her throat.

The gruel trickles down her throat like bile.

She chokes, her eyes burn.

Her stepfather seems to take it as a sign of weakness that she chokes – she should have swallowed down, inhaled it into her lungs, anything but the unseemliness of – but he smiles his silver smile and the smile extends to his eyes, his silver-blue eyes…

“Finish your porridge, Fanny.”

It is a command, but spoken smilingly, the smilingness of security, the smilingness that repudiates defiance.

The seat is tall and hard.

He does not let her move from there.

Time slides on in silver-whiteness.

The nights are bright this time of year.

She retches, vomits up the gruel onto her plate, it comes up from the coils of her stomach, the green of her own bile the only color in that grey spill, on that grey plate, on that grey table, in that grey room…

It was a convulsion of her body, not a conscious act. Still, she feels ashamed of herself, of this weak and tiny body of hers, this eight-year-old body…

Her eyes are watery from the choking, the vomiting – or maybe it is the tears – and when she raises her eyes to him, they are blurred, but she can make out the shape of him, and the shapes of his mother and sister, black blotches in the grey – _Finish it._

Fanny swallows the grey mush down. Perhaps she swallows down chunks of her own vomit spewed upon the plate, it hardly matters, what matters is that she _finishes it._

At last, a pallid hand extends her a handkerchief. She sniffles, wipes the crust from off her mouth, bows her head before the bishop.

The only color in that dull grey room, save the vestiges of the green sick on her plate, must be the red of her eyes, burning and bloodshot.

Her stepfather expects her to beg his forgiveness.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Edvard.”

He caresses her cheek, that cold smile extending to his eyes.

* * *

Not long thereafter, their stepfather begins locking them in – lest their mother flee with them.

* * *

Fanny is shrewder than her brother.

Alexander may be adept at lying, but his lies draw attention to themselves. They are screams of defiance, screams that strangle sobs, screams that supplant the weeping, but the weeping cannot be supplanted, always comes in spite of the reckless edge, the air of strength this boy of ten feels he must project, comes in the night when they are close to sleeping...

Alexander is older than her by a few years, but more helpless than her before the bishop.

Fanny’s lies are subtler than her brother’s.

She still calls her stepfather “Uncle Edvard” while Alexander can only bring himself to call him “that man who married my mother.”

In that, Alexander cannot bring himself to lie.

And when Alexander tells how he saw the bishop’s first wife and daughters with Justina looking on, she says as smoothly as her mother, _“There are no ghosts.”_

It’s a lie. She knows it. But she says it anyway.


End file.
